.mobi Interesting discussions raised by Mowser is going away: mobile is dead or just start?

[ChineseDomain]

Mowser is going away, does it mean that mobile is dead? Of course not, it just begins.

From the several discussions, we can see that most of the users are unaware of the dotMobi, unaware of the mtld.mobi, espn.mobi, foxnews.mobi, bafa.mobi, bmw.mobi, ...


(1) Is the Mobile Web Dead? Some Mobile Entrepreneurs Say Yes
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_the_mobile_web_dead.php

(2) Mobile Web: Over before it began?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8476

(3) Mobile Web Dead?
http://jeffnolan.com/wp/2008/04/14/mobile-web-dead/#comment-257572

 

[newdomainer.mobi]

I'm sorry that the guy behind Mowser has thrown the towel in but it would seem that he has done several things that would have been best off attended to earlier than this;

1). He seems to display all the signs of 'burn-out' & subsequent depression (which given his circumstances I can sympathise with him; he played a risky but brave card & lucked out on his timing.

2). He appears to have laid the blame for his failed business model on his potential consumers...
Big mistake, no-one ever made a soft-drink which tasted fabulous but didn't sell because their customers mucked it up... They either made a great product & didn't sell it right or they simply didn't get the product right..
Shame, but that's the way it goes... good products plus poor marketing & lack of funding (or both) will never thrive as much as a mediocre well branded, well funded & well marketed product...
If only they'd kept tweaking until they found what the customer wanted...........?

 

[DBADT2007]

I do agree with part of what Mr. Beattie, founder of Mowser, is saying. His company and similar companies that are bent in having services that mobilizes the web are in fact dying- formatting of full blown .com websites is not just about pulling out code and making one long page of links- which is not only ugly but in fact causes some phones to crash. That is why his service and others alike are failing.

The other day, I was doing a search on my phone through Google and the formatting was terrible (it didn't format correctly at all)- Google in its infinite wisdom miniaturized the logo so it would be able to fit my screen, only to scrunch the address and phone that was placed within the image, nice going Google- can't actually see what has been turned into gibberish. So, the whole point for what I was searching for and of having a mobilized .com version of it, failed miserably.

The lack of standardizations on the web addresses (with the exception of .mobis, which are mobile optimized) is what is leaving a lot of the phone users with web-enabled phones frustrated and completely lost. So what is it? m.whatever.com or wap.whatever.com or mobile.whatever.com or is it whatever.com/mobile? Oh wait, I can always use "some service" to mobilize the full blown .com, yeah that will work.

Final thoughts
So, do I support .mobi? No question about it, you get what you want and when you want it. What is starting to happen is that all the ".com mobilized versions" are beginning to fail, which makes it truly survival of the fittest. And .mobi is more than set to be the defacto standard.

 

[accent]

DBADT2007 --- That is the strongest argument on the tech side that I have heard for quite a while.

I do not know tech - but I know something about business. And I know that when a new market opens up the best bets are those ideas home-grown in and for that market, not ponderous solutions jury-rigged from other places and times. The only exception I can think of is Coca Cola, who have succeeded in pushing their vile swill into the most obscure places imaginable.

Mr. Beattie is correct, people will not want to spend hours in front of a tiny screen. What he misses is that they will want to check it ten or more times a day - for news, sports scores, email, weather, call a taxi, order pizza, find a restaurant, find a movie, find where a good deal on some item is, get directions.............and a thousand other uses we can not yet guess.